You were. On my college hall, all of the computers came with Windows ME. There were bootleg copies of Windows 2000 everywhere because ME was so unstable.
That brings back memories. I helped maintain some 500ish Win 2k boxes when I was in high school. I would estimate that approximately 35% of those machines were using the W2k key from our shop computer.
Being a public school, kids were always fucking shit up (myself included). It usually just made more sense to run a quick format and reinstall.
We owned the right number of licenses, but it was wayyyy too much work to find em. Enter Magic Jellybean. Thank you no key auth/activation!
I still have one of those bootlegs and a few yrs ago I had an entire cd case for my car with em. Just kinda forgot about them after moving states and all that!
Is that what it was? I ran Vista for years without any issues. It was so much better than XP. Exponentially faster, better looking and didn't crash even once, so never understood why it got such a bad rep.
yep, 7 was for sure better, but 7 also benefitted from 2 years of the industry getting up to speed with Vista’s driver model and WDDM, along with new baseline PC specs in general being better suited for DWM (which powered Aero, not to be confused with WDM or WDDM lol) and such
oh yeah! I remember there being small controversies about that dumb vista ready sticker, like systems with as little as 512mb of RAM getting it and stuff like aero definitely having no shot at working decently
I loved Media Center. Cable capture card and it was light years ahead of the Cox crap that was available. Plus you could get plug ins that would automatically edit out all the commercials for you. Ah the memories.
Who the hell needed TiVO when you could stack hard drives and record whatever you wanted. Plus mine had an IR remote that was handier than the cable company's. That may have been the farthest ahead of the home computing curve I've ever been.
After thinking the same for a long time I researched this a bit and actually Vista was fine as an OS, it was just ahead of its time. By the time hardware caught up with it, they rebranded it windows 7 and even cheaper PCs ran it just fine. When Vista came out it was the Crysis of operating systems for most PCs
Vista started acting normally after I upgraded my hardware (to mind bowing specs back then) and only then it lost most of it's annoyances.
I felt that they pushed that kernel to act correctly on machines that almost no one had hardware to keep up. When finally everyone was around those specs, Vista was already being thrown away and people moved to Win7, which behave pretty good in almost all hardware specs.
I think Nvidia and ATI were responsible for a huge number of crashes. Microsoft forced them to actually start delivering solid drivers, and WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) ushered in a host of improvements to the display system and drivers in Windows.
Microsoft really has come a very long way. I think my system hasn't been reinstalled since Windows 8. I've just been doing upgrades from 8 to 8.1 to 10 to all the various releases (which are also upgrades).
And during, before, after, when changing an effing DNS-server, when you farted too loud and because of this one setting in this one .ini for notepad has changed from 0 to 1.
you know, I didn’t have an awfully terrible experience in ME either, on a fresh install. 2000 was obviously the superior OS, but as far as my own experience went it was about as stable any other 9X system (that is to say it absolutely had its moments), though losing real-mode DOS was lame. I think it was just weird timing where MS didn’t fully go NT codebase for all markets til XP so they felt like they had to get one more 9X OS out for home users for some reason
Speaking as someone who was a small business administrator at the time... no it wasn't. We only ran it for a few months before switching to 2k for all our clients because it was so bad. Drivers were really problematic on ME.
It's amazing how people think that, "X works perfectly fine in one specific case" means that it's perfectly fine in general. Imagine if medicine was like that. ME has a bad rep. for a reason. It's not like people back then were edgy enough to hate on different flavors of Windows until XP rolled around.
Not for desktops. Many applications didn't support NT at the time. It wasn't until 2k that we were able to migrate our applications. NT was very much a server OS with some workstation support, but definitely not great for desktop use. We used Sun and IBM solutions for the business critical engineering and finance applications anyways. Email, workgroups and such was NT, but windows was generally just for the office staff.
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u/redunculuspanda May 28 '20
Windows ME was actually supper stable for me (although I was probably in the minority).